Movie City Indie Archive for September, 2019

“IT” has… stuff. [Mild spoilers.] You know if you want to see it, and if you want to see it, you’ll see it, and if you have reservations about seeing it, IT Chapter 2, or, “Grown Goonies in the Boonies,” is likely not for you.

Set in a visually undistinguished edition of Stephen King’s Maine-of-the-mind, the further deaths by misadventure of the make-it-up-as-you-go-along clown Pennywise should creep or repulse only the most devoted fans of the 2017 original or the most hidebound of coulrophobics. (Fan service and callbacks be thy curse.) Twenty-seven years after the doings of the $700 million worldwide-grossing adaptation of the early going of King’s 1,138-page skull-cracker, the Losers’ Club grown large, which once defeated the spectral murderer Pennywise, return to Derry in 2016 for a final bout. The opening hate crime-turned-murder that signals the return of the nightmare creature ends with a skyful of red balloons about as haunting as a pile-on of emojis rising from on Instagram on someone’s birthday. (The preceding torture and death goes on a good while, and includes extremely crunchy sounds of bodily harm.) [Read more.]

“The thought is interrupted by an odd interlude. We are speaking in the side room of Casita, a swish and fairly busy Italian bistro in Aoyama – a district of Tokyo usually so replete with celebrities that they spark minimal fuss. Kojima’s fame, however, exceeds normal limits and adoring staff have worked out who their guest is. He stops mid-sentence and points up towards the speakers, delighted. The soft jazz that had been playing discreetly across the restaurant’s dark, hardwood interior has suddenly been replaced with the theme music from some of Kojima’s hit games. Harry Gregson-Williams’ music is sublime in its context but ‘Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots’ is not, Kojima acknowledges, terribly restauranty. He pauses, adjusting a pair of large, blue-framed glasses of his own design, and returns to the way in which games have not only influenced films, but have also changed the way in which people watch them. “There are stories being told [in cinema] that my generation may find surprising but which the gamer generation doesn’t find weird at all,” he says.
~ Hideo Kojima

“They’re still talking about the ‘cathedral of cinema,’ the ‘communal experience,’ blah blah. The experiences I’ve had recently in the theatre have not been good. There’s commercials, noise, cellphones. I was watching Colette at the Varsity, and halfway through red flashes came up at the bottom of the frame. A woman came out and said, ‘We’re going to have to reboot, so take fifteen minutes and come back.’ Then they rebooted it from the beginning, and she had to ask the audience to tell her how far to go. You tell me, is that a great experience? I generally don’t watch movies in a cinema at all. Netflix is the future. It’s the present. But the whole paradigm of a series, binge-watching, it’s quite different. My first reaction is that it’s more novelistic, because if you have an eight-hour season, you can get into complex, intricate things. You can let it breathe and the audience expectations are such that they will let you, where before they wouldn’t have the patience. I think only the surface has been touched with experimenting with that.”
~ David Cronenberg